Archive for the ‘Linguistics in the comics’ Category
August 24, 2025
I’m barely getting through my days, but now suddenly there are five new things on my plate (and dozens of other postings I’ve failed to follow up on). I’ve picked the thing of most immediate interest, since it follows up on my posting yesterday “Yo soy Johnny Peso”, where I wrote about this cartoon:
(#1)
In the 8/22 Bizarro strip, Wayno presents us with Johnny Peso, an intricately constructed Mexican-Spanish and Mexican-culture counterpart to Johnny Paycheck as a performer on the Grand Ole Opry stage. If you don’t know about Johnny Paycheck and the Grand Ole Opry, you’re doomed; the cartoon will be incomprehensible. If you know who they are, you’ll get the joke; and the more you know about them, the more you’ll see in Wayno’s cartoon (I suspect there are still more things that I’ve missed). And then there’s a lot to say about the way Johnny Peso introduces himself [with the stiff and Englishy yo soy Johnny Peso].
Then came the objections. In a Facebook comment from David Preston and this blog comment from Geoff Nathan:
— GN: Are you sure it isn’t a reference to Johnny Cash?
— AZ > GN: A point also made on Facebook by David Preston. Yes, surely peso is a rough (metonymic) translation of cash, so Johnny Peso would be a Mexican Johnny Cash. But I made a case in this posting that Johnny Peso is a Mexican Johnny Paycheck. The answer is that in the world of cultural allusion, both things can be true. I’ll expand on this idea in a separate posting [the one you’re reading right now].
Shimmer is both a floor wax AND a dessert topping.
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Posted in Art, Identities, Linguistics in the comics, Music, Spanish, Understanding comics | Leave a Comment »
August 23, 2025
In the 8/22 Bizarro strip, Wayno presents us with Johnny Peso, an intricately constructed Mexican-Spanish and Mexican-culture counterpart to Johnny Paycheck as a performer on the Grand Ole Opry stage. If you don’t know about Johnny Paycheck and the Grand Ole Opry, you’re doomed; the cartoon will be incomprehensible. If you know who they are, you’ll get the joke; and the more you know about them, the more you’ll see in Wayno’s cartoon (I suspect there are still more things that I’ve missed). And then there’s a lot to say about the way Johnny Peso introduces himself. The cartoon:
(#1) The joke in the cartoon comes the two bilingual puns: Spanish peso punning on English paycheck, Spanish olé punning on English vernacular ole; the puns are, in addition, what I’ve called (semiotically) satisfying puns (if you’re puzzled by the odd symbols in the cartoon — Wayno says there are only 2 in this strip — see this Page)
And then there’s a lot more.
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Posted in Bilingualism, Clothing, Hats, Interjections, Linguistics in the comics, Movies and tv, Music, Names, Puns, Spanish, Understanding comics | 7 Comments »
August 22, 2025
In the New Yorker issue of 8/25/25, a typically goofy-clever cartoon by Sam Gross, offering SG’s proposal for how Jesus walked on the Sea of Galilee:
(#1) No miracle! But, wait! SG’s account relies on a different kind of miracle — the Octopus of God, gliding supportively underwater, foot to foot, carrying Christ across the sea; that’s the goofy part, God’s really mysterious ways, as the fish have it
(I especially admire SG’s depiction of Jesus as a magical Jew, deep in thought as he navigates.)
Now, for background, the account of Jesus’s aquambulation in the Christian Bible, a collection of texts Christians think of as the New Testament. (I note that SG, a Jew, assumed his readers would be familiar with the story, as part of the common culture of our society; for this, no one involved here has to believe anything.)
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Posted in Cartoonists, Language and religion, Linguistics in the comics, Understanding comics | 3 Comments »
August 21, 2025
In the latest (8/25/25) New Yorker, a Jeremy Nguyen cartoon in which some construction workers party in the sky:
(#1) A play on the well-known “Lunch atop a Skyscraper” photo originally taken in New York in 1932 (which I have labeled Skylunch 1; it was followed by a series of Skylunch variants)
Nguyen has 8 men, grouped 2, 2, 2, 1, 1; they are working-class guys in casual dress (caps rather than hard hats, no harnesses), standing (rather than sitting) around with simple party fare (rather than lunch boxes) in their hands. What guy #3 finds remarkable is not that they are standing on a girder suspended far above the city streets, but that they’re getting their little party in what is for them their lunch spot. This is elephantlessness: missing the elephant — in this case, the floating girder — in the situation.
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Posted in Clothing, Humor, Language and food, Linguistics in the comics, Photography, Social class, Social life, Sociocultural conventions, Understanding comics | 3 Comments »
August 11, 2025
This is stage 3 in the history of pop-cultural affirmations of individuality; it came to me in a framed version of the photo below, an image that’s graced a wall close to my worktable for many years, but has now come down in the great project of dispossession, as I undo the contents of my condo, which was once a kind of gigantic museum of visual delights of all sorts, covering almost every vertical surface, also filling shelves and crowding other horizontal surfaces (on a variety of themes, of which my family and my life, penguins, mammoths, penises, attractive male bodies, cartoons, and collages (many of them both antic and homoerotic) were especially prominent), with an accompanying library of books of equally varied delight:
(#1) It turns out (as I discovered by turning the sheet over) that this was a page in a calendar (presumably from Raymer’s employer, the National Geographical Society, which went on to use it in a line of t-shirts, still selling well); in any case, some 20 or 30 years ago, Raymer put together some of his photos of rockhopper penguins and added the defiant caption i just gotta be me (a sentiment with a history, which I’m about to sketch)
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Posted in Art, Linguistics in the comics, Music, My life, Penguins, Photography, Quotations, Titles | 2 Comments »
August 10, 2025
Today’s Rhymes With Orange strip (by Hilary B. Price) turns on reanalysis + analogical coining, yielding a kind of pun that looks like a deliberate eggcorn — embodied in that rare and elusive creature, the pencilguin, cousin to the penguin, but very much resembling a pencil, specifically a Dixon Ticonderoga (maybe even with the HB medium soft (#2) lead American children tend to favor):
(#1) The pen of penguin is probably Welsh pen ‘head’ (the bodypart), but suppose we (mis)take it to be English pen ‘instrument for writing or drawing with ink’, a reanalysis encouraged by penguins having black bodies as dark as ink; then we can venture to create the analogical name pencilguin, for a penguin-like creature having a pencil-like body rather than a pen-like one
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Posted in Eggcorns, Furnishings and tools, Linguistics in the comics, Penguins | Leave a Comment »
August 10, 2025
Today’s Dan Piraro Bizarro cartoon, in which the roles of ordinary life are Bizarro-reversed:
(#1) Those are living, breathing inkblots sitting in the chairs: a therapist inkblot showing a picture to a client inkblot; where you expect people, you get inkblot entities, and where you expect the picture of an inkblot, you get the picture of a person (in the title panel and the main panel, there are a ton of odd symbols; if you’re puzzled by them, see this Page)
Abstracting away from the details, we’re looking at two instances of the situation XXY:
— XXY: a situation in which three entities — two Xs (a therapist and a client) and a Y — are participants in an event in which the therapist X shows a reproduction of a Y to the client X
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Posted in Comic conventions, Events, Figurative language, Inversion, Linguistics in the comics, Participant roles, Semantics | Leave a Comment »
August 1, 2025
🐇 🐇 🐇 rabbit rabbit rabbit for August — and 🇨🇭 Swiss National Day 🇨🇭 (I am of course wearing my Swiss flag gym shorts — with a bright red FAGGOT tank top, to be sure, but I am sporting the flag of my forefathers)
Today’s (Piccolo & Price) Rhymes With Orange strip depends on the viewer identifying the main character, the one who says he wants to go someplace busy and crowded, as a pop-cultural figure known for losing himself in crowds:
British Wally / American Waldo, uncomfortable out in the open, with only one other person close to him
My 8/3/13 posting “The Weinerfest rolls on” has a section on the Where’s Wally / Waldo? books, with this Wikipedia note:
The books consist of a series of detailed double-page spread illustrations depicting dozens or more people doing a variety of amusing things at a given location. Readers are challenged to find a character named Wally hidden in the group. Wally’s distinctive red-and-white-striped shirt, bobble hat, and glasses make him slightly easier to recognise, but many illustrations contain “red herrings” involving deceptive use of red-and-white striped objects.
So of course he’s uneasy, sitting in such an exposed spot.
Thanks to his distinctive garb, Waldo is a frequent subject of cartoons. My 2/17/18 posting “Tell them you haven’t seen him” has a sampling of 4 of them.
Posted in Books, Events and occasions, Linguistics in the comics, Pop culture, Understanding comics | Leave a Comment »
July 30, 2025
Very briefly (it’s been a hellish day). In my comics feed for today, penultimate July, Mark Parisi’s off the mark cartoon of 7/16/25, in which an AmE football and a BrE football fail to hook up with a sportsball of their own kind — next to one another in a bar.
In the RomCom version, of course, they go on to find satisfaction in hooking up with (aka dating) one another, in the thrill of the new and different.
Otherwise, you see the pitfalls of dating through text only; if they communicated by voice, they’d get nationality information. (Though in the real world, a British football would know that such a brown sportsball was called a football in the US. Whether an American football could be depended upon to know that a soccer ball was called a football in the UK is not so clear to me.)
Posted in Ambiguity, Dialects, Language and sports, Linguistics in the comics, Variation | Leave a Comment »
July 27, 2025
Rina Piccolo’s Rhymes With Orange strip of 7/21 presents us with a dog that can read — not just converting text to sound (speaking written or printed matter aloud), but, crucially for the strip, converting text to meaning (‘looking at and comprehending the meaning of written or printed matter by mentally interpreting the characters or symbols of which it is composed’ (a definition adapted from NOAD)):
(#1) Panel 1: happy dog, in a state of innocence; panel 2, where all the action happens: dog sees sign, recognizes that it is a sign, reads it, understands that the sign says that its reader should beware of some dog in the sign’s surroundings (specifically, in the yard the sign is posted in), and recognizes that it is a dog in that yard, consequently concluding that it is the dog the sign’s reader is supposed to beware of, and unpacks the meaning of imperative beware as a warning, about the potential danger of this dog, therefore concluding that it has a reputation as a dangerous animal; panel 3, dog exhibits ferocity fitting to its reputation, by growling at passers-by
So that is one astoundingly clever dog. with an understanding of English and a ton of culture-specific information (about keeping dogs as pets and confining them in enclosed yards, about issuing warnings, and about the interpretation of material printed on signs, not to mention self-recognition, the knowledge that he is a dog). Why, you might think that dog was human — an American, in fact.
Now, some earlier postings (from 2015 and 2021), and notes from 2018 for one that never got posted, because it had started to branch into an essay on everything there is to say about signage– so here you’ll get the notes.
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Posted in Context, Language and animals, Linguistics in the comics, Pragmatics, Reading, Signage, Sociocultural conventions, Speech acts, Understanding comics | Leave a Comment »
